Arcade Fire - Reflektor (2013)

CD1: 1) Reflektor; 2) We Exist; 3) Flashbulb Eyes; 4) Here Comes the Night Time; 5) Normal Person; 6) You Already Know; 7) Joan of Arc

CD2: 1) Here Comes the Night Time II; 2) Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice); 3) It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus); 4) Porno; 5) Afterlife; 6) Supersymmetry

Shorter than your average double album but packed with far more concepts than normal. Arcade Fire start a new chapter of their career with a dense beast you can dance to.

Key tracks: “Reflektor”, “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)”, “Afterlife”

By Reflektor, Arcade Fire had openly become a band who were just as much about their concepts as they were about their music, and those two aspects held hands very tightly. There had been a gradual shift from Funeral's coordinated Victorian hipster uniforms to the carefully planned recurring motifs and visual accompaniments of The Suburbs, with Arcade Fire spending more time with each album to create some form of mythology around them. Reflektor itself above all signals a new chapter for the band and a re-invention of sorts, but its new sound often distracts from what an incredibly dense record it is from a thematic perspective. If the band were emphasising the conceptual aspects of their songwriting process then Reflektor is where that cup started to risk overflowing: it's an album that places its foot in so many doorways and crams a number of entirely disparate concepts together into a wide collage, with a rabbit hole of ideas hidden underneath waiting to swallow up its listeners. 

 

It's understandable though that the new musical direction attracts the most attention. All great artists go through a skinshedding moment eventually and in the case of Arcade Fire, theirs was to suddenly and shockingly move from beloved indie anthems into disco-ready floor stompers. Except, not quite. For one thing, it's not as if the concept of putting a groove on was ever alien to the band - check out all those four-to-the-floor finales on Funeral - and so Reflektor is more of an extension of something that was always lying underneath. But most damningly narrowing the scope down to just the prevalence of open hi-hat beats sells the album's range short. It's true that its most prominent moments are clearly inclined to hit the dancefloor, but focusing on that means you ignore the carnival anthems, the riff-rockers (in both loud and jangly varieties), the theatrical centrepieces and the synthesizer mood moments that inhabit Reflektor's two discs. The underlying narrative thread is on sustaining a groove of some kind and letting the rhythm lead the way as much as the melodies, but Reflektor casts its nets far wider than just that.

Reflektor is split into two discs, mainly out of circumstance: the band intended to make a short record, which they failed to do spectacularly when they kept writing 6-7 minute songs, and so splitting the final album into two distinct halves was primarily a way to compromise on the initial idea. That said, the two discs do also roughly correlate with the album's main lyrical concepts and, coincidentally or not, also arrange the album's musical motifs into tidy movements. The first disc is the endlessly style-shifting beast that walks a varied journey across only seven songs, where Regine Chassagne's Haitian roots (which inspired much of the record from the sound to the stagewear and the promotional graffitis that signalled the album's arrival) meet with the co-production from LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who casts his New York cool all over the songs. It's also where the whole 'reflector' concept comes in play the most: at the time Win Butler was binging on Søren Kierkegaard and his writings about "a reflective age", mass conformity and their effect on human identity, and those particularly existential flavours form the thematic line between the otherwise disjointed songs. Meanwhile the second disc is a more tightly knit musical suite which operates within similar soundscapes throughout its dramatic flow, utilising the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and its tragedies love affair as the central lyrical inspiration for its six songs. The band were also working for the score for Spike Jonze's film Her around the same time and there's traces of its takes on love as a mystical force running across the tracks as well: directly in case of "Supersymmetry", which was composed for the film and then reformatted for Reflektor. 

 

What Arcade Fire have created with Reflektor is a space where those potentially preposterous - or pretentious, if you wish, but I'd give you a disappointed glare - ideas and Butler's wildly hit-and-miss writing pen find a musical format where they turn out to work phenomenally. When I talk about Reflektor being dense, it's because it's a record where I find it harder than normal to split the concept from the sound and treat the songs as just songs, because you have all these thematic threads from the Haitian carnivals to love after literal and metaphorical death to 'we live in a society' style creeds, and then they're bundled up with songs which are impossibly stylish and yet often forebodingly threatening, both looking at its topics as a cold and detached spectator and someone caught within the turmoil. This is particularly the case on the first half. "Reflektor" is only right to start the album as the title track as it's a hefty song with a lot going on - seven and a half minutes of Haitian percussion swinging with disco beats, French and English vocal swaps, David Bowie cameos, nods to the Kierkegaard writings, a tonal shift which moves the song from a cool indie club banger to a hair-raising crescendo that's like the moment you realise the storm has arrived and it's too late to run. It works phenomenally: it's one of Arcade Fire's all-time greats and as the very first song it signals accurately that there will be no limits to where this record could go.

 

The rest of disc one is effectively an extension of "Reflektor", in that it is a lot of big ideas running around to a point that they form an almost impossible to control hurricane of inspiration. "We Exist" sways even further into the disco with its "Billie Jean" bass while heavily implying but never outright saying what identity issues it exactly refers to (the official video opts for trans representation), lacing its funky slickness with both defiance and venom. The dub nod of "Flashbulb Eyes" and the carnival breakdown of "Here Comes the Night Time" are most directly inspired by the Haitian excursions the band were taking prior to the record, taking Arcade Fire into brand new waters musically but melting those influences naturally into a part of their sound. From here Arcade Fire suddenly realise they are a rock band too, and so "Normal Person" trashes the hotel room with its big electric guitars and is cathartically fun in its over the top antics and self-aware tongue-in-cheekiness, "You Already Know" is a deliciously melodic foray into 80s indie and quite possibly the most criminally underrated song across the entire two discs (and for a person living in the UK, that Jonathan Ross cameo never stops being weird), and "Joan of Arc" is all glam swagger, big drums and big fist pumps. It's a hefty, strange journey where each song is a curveball, but all the elements come together to create something incredible and truly memorable: sincerity and irony melt into a surreal concoction delivered with so much passion it doesn't matter which way it swings, the general songwriting is some of the band's strongest, and the production and arrangements are both ingeniusly detailed as well as creatively chaotic. It's a bewildering set of songs but excitingly so, a true treasure trove of creativity.

The second disc gives the album its breathing space because it's a lot less manic than the first half. The songs play more comfortably together in sound and tone, and are a more direct realisation of the threads that The Suburbs' more synth-laden moments hinted for the band to take. It's a quiet start with the reprise of "Here Comes the Night Time" acting as the bridge between the two discs and "Awful Sound" (which is anything but) acting as a calmer counterpart to "Reflektor" in how its announces its disc's themes - it bears a lush, quintessentially Arcade Fire -esque sound but updated for the reflective age, glimmering in keyboards, filters and processed drums. The second half doesn't truly kick into its groove until "It's Never Over", and when that kick arrives it's massive: the stammering, thick beat is already appropriately dramatic for the increase in bombast that the song brings, but it's in particular the moment when the verses come back alive after the first breakdown and announce their arrival with a triumphant horn section, that the second side of Reflektor truly begins in earnest. It's a spellbinding moment that continues to sound incredible each listen, with the long multi-song build-up reaping its rewards beautifully. "Porno" and "Supersymmetry" both move further into a more synthesizer-friendly ground, the former clicking and popping with such a heavily theatrical tone that it almost obscures just how great the suave build-up and chorus melody is, and "Supersummetry" gives the album a beautifully understated and quietly epic finale. Its ascending harmonies are a long cry from the frantic start of the record, with all bliss and no discord in its star-gazing atmosphere. It's a lush and gorgeous ending, even if the decision to tack on extra six minutes of ambient noise at the end is arguably one production choice too far, because it adds so little to the conclusion of the record. The album also bears a hidden pre-gap track in the null space of the first disc which is effectively just some of the key melodies of the record played in reverse, and if you ask me it would have served as a more interesting ambient outro.

What really makes the ending of Reflektor is the presence of "Afterlife" as the penultimate song, the great finale before the finale as is the band's tradition. "Afterlife" is heartache under the mirror ball, melancholy and carefully hidden despair that run away from their emotional heft onto the dancefloor to try and forget. It's a beautiful and powerful song and serves as the emotional climax of Reflektor as a whole, with the mania and thunderball energy of the album's first half returning and powering up the more introspectively charged reflection of its second half for one last dance. It sweeps away with its woah-ohs and ever-intensifying choruses while the layered percussions and simple keyboard riff give it a lightweight, light-footed tone that disguises just how colossal of a tune it is. But Butler sounds defeated and like he already knows the answer when he pleads if he can make it through; the way he utters "oh my god, what an awful word" towards the start of the song packs so much evocative emotion in how low-key loathed it is. The first disc of the record indulged in its excesses and the second disc saw the comedown slowly growing more lucid, and "Afterlife" as the whole record's undeniable highlight slots right there as the moment where all the shields come down and what's left is the same charismatic emotion and sincerity that has always shined through in the band.

That final set of songs is where Reflektor is its most emotionally evocative; in fact, for most of its duration Arcade Fire keep their usual level of sentimentality and vulnerability out of Reflektor. It's an emotionally distanced record until it starts breaking away its barriers towards its finale, and that's potentially what prevents it from being one of the all-time greats: that as much as I love Reflektor, it just lacks that one final emotional hook. My personal resonance for the album lies largely in how strongly the worldbuilding took me over. The band were creating something larger than just a record with Reflektor, with the emphasis on extramusical details that the band built around the album: the pre-release shenanigans, the more theatrical live shows with extras and dramatic stage performances, as well as the supplementing features (including the pseudo-live feature Here Comes the Night Time with its hectic celebrity cameos, an exercise in millennially ironic surreality). They were selling a full concept, and I was buying it - when a band goes the extra mile, I tend to be the type of nerd who openly bites the bait. So Reflektor isn't just the music for me, it's also the countless mental images and recollections of particularly arresting visual moments the band scattered across its period and which are now forever associated with these songs: the "Reflektor" video, the Glastonbury performance of "It's Never Over" with Regine in her own section surrounded by skeletal extras, the "Afterlife" live performances illuminated by mirrorball light (with the Tonight Show and Graham Norton Show appearances above all), the Here Comes the Night Time visuals, and more. Arcade Fire created a visually arresting and sublimely cohesive universe throughout the Reflektor period, which in its own way is awe-inspiring. It may seem irrelevant to some to highlight so many things that aren’t found within the album itself, but for me, the music of Reflektor is impossible to tear away from its peripheral material.

The music is, of course, incredible just as it is too. With Reflektor Arcade Fire threw everything around them into a singular melting pot, took a gamble to forge a new path with what they pulled out of the pot, and created a classic record: a thrilling and invigorating explosion of inspiration which, yes, is also good to dance to at times.

 

Rating: 9/10

 

Physical corner: An extremely shiny gatefold with each silver/gray element being vividly reflective (it’s just a reflector!). A separate fold-out lyrics sheet for both discs.

Ben Houge - Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura OST (2001)

 
1) Arcanum; 2) The Demise of the Zephyr; 3) Wilderness; 4) Tarant; 5) Tarant Sewers; 6) Caladon; 7) Caladon Catacombs; 8) Dungeons; 9) Battle at Vendigroth; 10) Tulla; 11) Towns; 12) The Isle of Despair; 13) Mines; 14) Cities; 15) Radcliffe's Commission; 16) The Vendigroth Wastes; 17) Villages; 18) Qintarra; 19) The Wheel Clan; 20) The Void; 21) Kerghan's Castle

An atypically mournful score for an arrestingly captivating game.

Key tracks: "Arcanum", "Tarant", "Villages"

One of the recurring phrases and themes in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series is that the world has moved on: that the passage of time is inevitable and natural, but it's made out of different eras starting and ending and that transition is rarely an instant process. Sometimes you find yourself in a time and place where the old world is dying while the new one is yet to truly begin. Whenever I play through Arcanum, that phrase keeps entering my head. The setting of Arcanum is a fantasy realm the kind of which we know inside and out, with its noble knights, fearsome dragons, powerful wizards and familiar faces from dwarves to orcs to elves. But the game itself takes place at a time when those dwarves have discovered steam technology and where the realm's most fearsome knights suffered an embarrasing defeat when the opposing nation brought out muskets. The last dragon was slain not too long ago, and the formerly ever-present magic is now being replaced by synthetic electricity as the industrial age beckons forward. The world has moved on, and many of its inhabitants have found themselves misplaced in the process.

Arcanum is a game with a great sadness in its heart. The technology that has appeared is not evil, but as the old world shifts to the new the change leaves a melancholy trace behind it. Ben Houge's beautiful score underlines this sentiment perfectly. The vast majority of Houge's soundtrack has been arranged for and performed by a string quartet, with the mournful tones of its components left to dominate the game's music almost fully on their own. It's a subdued and downstated soundtrack, with its melodies playing out like laments for the areas the player character travels in; even the combat music isn't the kind that gets your energy pumping, but one which draws out the tension of the conflict. It's only in the last four songs of the tracklist where the score changes tract: The score only changes tract for the last four tracks in the tracklist: "Qintarra" and "The Wheel Clan" feature additional percussion while "The Void" and "Kerghan's Castle" are ambient-like synthesizer exercises. They break the cohesive mood to some extent, but they're different for a reason as the first two feature in the areas that act as the few lasting remnants of Arcanum's pre-technological age, while the latter are used in the more otherwordly sections of the game which literally move away from the game's normal setting. So, they're conceptually solid and the arrangements are just as sharp (for the percussion cuts anyway, given the minimalist approach of the other two), and leaving them to the end of the tracklist is probably the least disruptive way they could be included.

If you can call a game soundtrack an underappreciated gem then this fits the description excellently - much like the game itself, which belongs in my personal pantheon of all-time greats even if the gaming world at large has moved on from it. Houge's score is a gorgeous accompaniment to the generally brilliant game because it fleshes out the game's setting so strongly and leaves an impact in just how perfectly it emphasises the game's tone. I might even carefully choose to suggest it for even those who haven't played the game, if string quartets are one's jam - the arrangements are perfectly evocative on their own.

Rating: 8/10

SIG - Hyvää syntymäpäivää: 18 hittiä (1995)

1) Hyvää syntymäpäivää; 2) Tiina menee naimisiin; 3) Vuosisadan rakkaustarina; 4) Leijailen; 5) Elämä vie mua; 6) Ludwig Van Beethoven; 7) Jos sä rakastat minua; 8) Kolme sanaa sinulle; 9) Matti Inkinen; 10) Sadan vuoden yksinäisyys; 11) Älä sinä huoli; 12) Jos taivas on vain pienille enkeleille; 13) Viipuripop; 14) Lauantaina; 15) Kartsaa; 16) Kerro mitä on rakkaus; 17) Marianne; 18) Purppura

18-hit budget compilation from a band who had about three that have survived the age of time.

Key tracks: "Hyvää syntymäpäivää", "Vuosisadan rakkaustarina"

Back when car CD players were a new thing, my dad got into the habit of buying all kinds of CDs from mid-price sections and bargain buckets - often budget "best of" compilations - to play during driving. I lived in a small town so none of our shared journeys would ever take more than 3-4 songs, and in the occasional case where we'd exceed that my dad demonstrated his very liberal use of the skip button. I've thus ended up with particularly strong memories associated with a very small handful of songs from a number of all kinds of acts from the 70s and 80s.

SIG were a Finnish example of the typical path a lot of groups took around the 80s, starting out early in the decade with a more punk-oriented sound, but soon shaping into a more of a new-wave act and getting a couple of hits out of it. Those hits are the first three songs on this compilation and they're the best it has to offer. They're the kind of Big Pop Classics that will always get airplay and stay evergreen - partially because SIG were cunning enough to have them centered around particular themes that would ensure their inclusion in any themed compilations for decades to come (birthdays, weddings and head-over-heels romance perfect for Valentine's, respectively). They're corny, a bit dated and somewhat ramshackle but that's part of their charm, and they're completely fluffy but sometimes you don't need anything else but a good hook.

I have no recollection whatsoever about the rest of the compilation, and given the songs are mostly just inferior copies of the first three songs there's not much need to go beyond those initial moments either. There's also a couple of attempts at ballads (forgettable) and a few inexplicable stabs at rockabilly (godawful), further highlighting how preposterous the "18 hits" claim in the title is. SIG aren't a classic band or anything that really needs any relevance beyond their minor part of collective Finnish pop culture consciousness, and it's clear which songs are the reason this compilation is a thing in the first place. Me owning this copy (which is the very same disc my dad used to play) is solely because of faint nostalgic reasons and it's fun to know that even though our music tastes are worlds apart, we'd both go on a skip spree with this one.

Rating: 4/10

Kent - B-Sidor 95-00 (2000)

CD1: 1) Chans; 2) Spökstad; 3) Längtan skala 3:1; 4) Om gyllene år; 5) Noll; 6) Önskar att någon...; 7) Bas riff; 8) Din skugga; 9) Elever; 10) Längesen vi sågs; 11) December; 12) Utan dina andetag; 13) På nära håll
CD2: 1) Livrädd med stil; 2) Verkligen; 3) Gummiband; 4) Att presentera ett svin; 5) En helt ny karriär; 6) Rödljus; 7) Pojken med hålet i handen (Hotbilds version); 8) Kallt kaffe; 9) Den osynlige mannen (Kazoo version); 10) Slutsats; 11) Rödljus II; 12) En helt ny karriär II; 13) Papin jahti [hidden track]

The b-sides for the first four albums; as it often is, uneven but with surprises in unexpected places.

Key tracks: "Chans", "Längesen vi sågs", "Verkligen"

Kent’s b-sides compilation arrives at the time and moment when you would have expected a greatest hits compilation to have happened, and it feels like a bit of a power move. Together with a few new songs, one which got the kind of retrospective clip show music video you normally reserve for promotional singles from best offs, B-sidor 95-00 sees Kent repackaging their career so far in their own terms, by highlighting the songs that rode off on the backs of their hits. And there were a good number of them: the 1990s were the golden period of single bonus tracks, particularly in the UK where they were an art form onto their own and often something bands were prided for: for these bands, a b-sides compilation could easily have been another hits collection. With Kent’s career so far being so very obviously inspired by their British counterparts, they had taken it upon themselves to carry that tradition in their own region.

The two discs of B-sidor 95-00 run in a counter-chronological fashion, so the first disc covers the b-sides to the mainstream hit singles from Hagnesta Hill and Isola, while the second disc features outtakes from the first two albums Verkligen and Kent. With that in mind, disc one is where you’d expect the big hitters to be but it actually feels rather... underwhelming? Or to put it in another way, it's  predictable. Not just in how it sounds, i.e. that the songs carry same slick guitar moves as their parent albums, but even in how they're presented: all the singles from Isola and Hagnesta Hill carried two b-sides (apart from "Kevlarsjäl", which was backed solely by "Längtän skala 3:1") and in each case they're a big rock song backed by a quiet, sparse mood piece next. The entirety of disc one after the first few songs (i.e. the new tracks) effectively plays out the same across the board and you end up feeling like you are constantly tracing steps back to where you just came from. Of course, this wouldn’t be the case if the material was strong enough to ignore but a lot of the songs on the first disc, and in particular those fleshed out full-band takes, feel a lot like underdeveloped or overall lesser versions of what Kent were releasing on their albums at the time. There are great songs within the bunch: in particular the beautifully growing "Längesen vi sågs" could have easily had a spotlight moment on an album and represents the kind of quality that you perhaps would have expected, and "Utan dina andetag" has a preciousness to its big 90s rock riffs which goes a long way explaining why it's become a legitimate hit in Sweden (it even got a spot on Kent's career retrospective best of collection - it’s apparently a very popular wedding song in Sweden?). But they’re one of the few that really jump out, and in fact I find myself enjoying those quiet mood pieces like "December" and "Om gyllene år" more than I do the big rock songs because they show something a little bit different in context.  

 

It is surprisingly the second disc which is where the compilation gets really interesting and exciting. I find Kent's first two albums to have been made by a band who were still clearly a work in progress: they're promising but uneven records, with the band still in the process of aligning their vision with their songwriting. And yet, these b-sides are so much more interesting than you would expect from this period in chronology. There's extensions to the band’s rock sound where they break away from the more self-serious approach on the records to something more relaxed, like the rough but big-hearted and beautiful "Verkligen" (one of my favourite things to come out of the second album’s sessions and a shame it never made it to the titular record), the scruffy riffing of "Livrädd med stil" and the stupid fun punk of "Kallt kaffe". Other songs find the band experimenting with electronic production long before it started appearing on the records, leading to excellently atmospheric cuts like "Gummiband" and "Att presentera ett svin", which sound like the works of an entirely different act to the one who recorded the A-sides. Some of the songs are obvious demos without the tag in place, but for example "Rödljus" befits from the rawer production which lends it a kind of warmth and intimacy that it might not have otherwise had. It’s so intriguing that it’s this earlier period where B-sidor 95-00 really shines, given the parent albums are among the band’s weakest (purely due to their more undeveloped nature) - it shows that Kent were holding back certain aspects of themselves away from the albums, where perhaps they felt they had to act in a more polished manner.

 

B-sidor 95-00 rounds itself off with a few new tracks as the bookends. “Chans” and “Spökstad" are two brand new songs which effectively bridge between the present and what’s next: slick and stylish production, a more programmed sound and an ear tuned for the hooks, as initially trialled on Hagnesta Hill. The sleepy ballad “Chans” is the better of the two, unfolding into a beautifully understated dramatic rise atop its ethereal keyboard layers. “Spökstad" is a preview of the upcoming Vapen & ammunition in sound and the more hit-oriented of the two songs, and it's a fine song, but perhaps suffers a little from the band effectively doing its shtick better throughout the next album. Meanwhile the end of the second disc sees the band returning to the two most obvious demos of the selection and fleshing them out years later. Kent end up treating the two songs pretty similarly, both climbing up to epic explosive finales with cymbal crashes and soloing guitars, and to be fair, they're a band who do that particular trick really well. "Rödljus" as established before already worked pretty well as a more stripped-down demo, so it's more "En helt ny karriär" that benefits from the re-envisioning as it gets to switch the placeholder drum machine into a full band, equipped to take the song where it was always destined to be. 

(There is also technically a fifth new song, the hidden track "Papin jahti" at the end of the second disc which is an improvisational comedy piece and not really worth anyone's time beyond the obvious novelty that it's meant to be - though it is fun for me to hear a Kent piece in Finnish, sung by the Finn-Swede drummer Markus Mustonen)

In the end, I suppose B-sidor 95-00 reflects the period it represents accurately enough. Kent's first four albums are a mixed bag, solely because they're like a live presentation of a band developing themselves: the rough start, the evolution, the realisation of their strengths, and figuring out their own sound bit by bit. For the first two albums Kent hid the fine-tuning of that development behind the scenes and away from the main albums, which this compilation brings out to light; with the next two records those ideas started getting the spotlight so the b-sides simply became more of what the albums offered, just not as well. It caps off one particular period of Kent's journey and empties the table before the next chapter, which is arguably why it feels so much like a curveball alternative for the standard career-so-far summary of a greatest hits compilation. But b-side compilations tend to always be either incredible or uneven, and B-sidor 95-00 is the latter. It warrants to dig deep though: that second disc is some of my favourite early Kent in full disc length.

Rating: 7/10

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (2010)

1) The Suburbs; 2) Ready to Start; 3) Modern Man; 4) Rococo; 5) Empty Room; 6) City With No Children; 7) Half Light I; 8) Half Light II (No Celebration); 9) Suburban War; 10) Month of May; 11) Wasted Hours; 12) Deep Blue; 13) We Used to Wait; 14) Sprawl I (Flatlands); 15) Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains); 16) The Suburbs (Continued)

You might think it's back to basics but really, it's a suburban sprawl: cosey and homely perhaps, but sneakily taking over new territories.

Key tracks: "The Suburbs", "Ready to Start", "Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains)"

The Suburbs is a palate cleanser for Arcade Fire. Neon Bible took their crescendo-driven songwriting to its absolute limit, and I loved every orchestrally exploding, choir-drowned, organ-bellowing second of it. But, there is a limit to just how big you can get and after that you either start repeating your tricks or you can choose to move to a different aisle. It wasn't just bigger in sound but also in its message, Win Butler shifting his sights from the snow-covered neighbourhoods of Funeral to doom-mongering over the entire world. A few years later and those sentiments had moved to self-doubt, or as The Suburbs at one point puts it so aptly: "you never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount / I used to think I was not like them but I’m beginning to have my doubts”.

 

The Suburbs is a return to smaller stakes, to some extent. It's still very much an Arcade Fire record with all the epic moments that come with that name attached, but in the context of this particular group it's scaled down, stripping away a lot of the extra bells and whistles that they themselves had introduced to the 00s indie rock scene. It's more down to earth and firmly fixed in the personal scale of its titular nostalgic suburbs - Butler shrinks the record’s aim into the microcosm of the neighbourhoods and faded teenage memories, personal stories and introspection from when the rest of the world was just a blurry image in the horizon. Alongside that, the music pulls back as well: the production is more straightforward, even compared to Funeral, and the album frequently takes its time enjoying the stillness rather than ramping up to the finale, as evidenced by numerous two-parter songs with extended introductionary sequences or outros. The Suburbs still layered in multitudes - the band is a septet of multi-instrumentalists after all - but its approach is, in lack of a better word, less show-offy about the wide range of talent the band hold.

The greatest trick The Suburbs pulls is hiding its own expansiveness underneath a back-to-basics exterior: it's an experimental, transitional record in disguise. Crowd-inspiring anthems were Arcade Fire's signature move, but third time doing them in the same way and you could start wearing the concept thin - but at the same time, the band weren't seemingly sure where exactly to steer their ship either. Thus, Arcade Fire aren’t reinventing themselves here and the stylistic concepts of the first two records are running throughout The Suburbs - “Rococo” carries the maximalism of Neon Bible and the close-to-heart warmth of e.g. “The Suburbs” and “Modern Man” descend from the homegrown intimacy of Funeral. Many of the album's greatest moments have their feet stuck firmly in the band's own musical history, particularly with the hazy melancholy of its marching title track and the stunning "Suburban War" which is one of the band's most gorgeously arranged pieces with most arresting melodies - both of which still sound like familiar Arcade Fire by this stage. But those recognisable siybds are are intermittently scattered in-between the rest of the sprawling 16-track record, serving as the center for the ideas board the rest of the album represents and used as springboards to new areas. It's why it's not quite accurate to call The Suburbs simply an Arcade Fire record that got toned down, because a good two thirds of the record sees the band pulling in new ideas or executing old ones in different ways.

How that manifests most notably is in just how dynamic The Suburbs sounds - or in other words, how much it rocks. Arcade Fire have never exactly been close to the 'rock' part of 'indie rock', but for The Suburbs they channel their characteristic zeal and arena-sized energy into giving their songs a right kick under the rear. There’s a world of difference between e.g. the stadium fist-pumper “Ready to Start”, the noisy punk brattiness of “Month of May” and the baroque shoegaze of “Empty Room”, but what they all share is the sheer show of force in their sound and in the playing. One of Arcade Fire’s greatest assets is their passionate intensity and throughout The Suburbs they use that to be loud, fervent and exhilirating. Many of its most deftly arranged, gorgeously performed songs lie in its less frantic corners, but it's that punchiness of its most electrically charged songs that really sticks out when you actually play the album - and even during the subtler moments, there's a liveliness and strength to the band's play that comes naturally when now-seasoned live veterans return to bashing things out together within the same small four walls. In Arcade Fire's context The Suburbs is an intimate record, but only in the sense that the sweat in the player's brows is palpable through the sheer power of their playing, as they bring the songs to life in what is for them a relatively low-stakes production environment.

It's why “Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains)” works so well at the end of the album. The other stylistic undercurrent cutting across The Suburbs is that it features a couple of songs where synthesizers dominate the soundscape - which, if you're aware of the wider discography, is in retrospect a clear test run for the ideas that would start popping around the next set of records. The twilight rave of "Half Light II" (which marries beautifully to its more Suburbs-like first half) is an exciting jolt of surprise already, but "Sprawl II" gets the fabled penultimate spot: the tracklist slot where Arcade Fire always bring out their record-defining highlights. Compared to most of the earnestly self-serious The Suburbs, it’s a complete 180° - a perkily pop-flirting number lead by Reginé Chassagne, all bright synth leads, bubbling synth bass and a light-footed, shuffling rhythm eager to hit the dancefloor. Where Butler has been searching for meaning in adolescent experiences and got lost on the path between the suburbs and where he is now (and as an aside, this is probably Butler's peak as a lyricist and "Suburban War" in particular is sublime and nails down the record's entire concept beautifully), Chassagne brings the colour back into the world. “Sprawl II” is a fantastic song, radiating with so much genuine warmth and fun - it's still caught in the anxiety of growing up somewhere so small that you felt trapped, but it's bursting with defiance and pride about escaping into the wider world. It subtly shifts up from its quaint beginnings into a veritable giant and even still it sounds so lightweight it could practically fly off. As the de facto closer of the record (the reprise of “The Suburbs” at the literal end is really just an outro), it not just brings the album's various threads together, but it turns them into the proud declaration of intent that the rest of the album shies away from - and it does it with a massive smile on its face. That contrast at the end works so very beautifully. 

 

"Sprawl II" also draws a line on the ground as it starts pulling the curtains to a close: it's the most out-and-out diversion from what had been established as The Arcade Fire Sound, and after The Suburbs the band took it as their main inspiration to move away from that sound. Which makes The Suburbs somewhat of a pivotal record for the band because while on one hand it takes a step back towards a tone closer to their roots, it ultimately represents a desire to change, for the band to start shifting shape. Yet, its stylistic experiments are still done with an overall cohesion in mind as part of the Wider Concept of the record, and they're tucked in-between songs which basically sound just like more great Arcade Fire songs - so you might never even realise just how much it's started to move away from the expected. That's why it's not necessarily one of their more stand-out records, because it feels like a slight retread unless you really start paying attention to it - and it definitely could have shaved off a few songs and the "Wasted Hours" / "Deep Blue" couplet has always been the section that comes to my mind - and I for one certainly underestimated as such for a long time after its release. In retrospect The Suburbs' true nature becomes more clear though, both as a hint towards the future and final farewell to the past, and from a completely personal angle it took me a good many years after its release to realise just how good of a record it was and why. If it's possible for Arcade Fire to release a slowburner then this is it, but its thrills are many and various.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: The Suburbs was released with a whopping nine different cover variants where the scenery in front of the car differs; mine is the (appropriately) suburban neigborhood shot. I didn’t choose this one specifically, it just happened to be the one in the shop at the time. Gatefold packaging with a fold out lyrics sheet.